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back to article NASA to develop haptic air-typing spacesuit gloves

NASA is considering plans to integrate haptic vibro feedback and Halting State style air-writing accelerometer capability into spacesuit gloves. The news came this week as the space agency announced candidates selected for its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) pork handouts. Among the successful applicants was Virginia …

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  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    Touch typing astonauts

    The final frontier

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  2. Anonymous John

    Gloves

    There was a Register story earlier this week about NASA's glove competition.

    There's an astronaut's take on the problem here.

    http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20091123/NEWS02/911230317/1006

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  3. mccp

    Hmm.

    How exactly would the accelerometer know which way was up?

    I'm assuming here that the astronaut is orbiting the earth so gravity is not likely to be much use to give a "down".

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    1. SkippyBing
      Reply Icon

      @hmmm

      I don't think it matters which way up is, it just needs to register the change in direction of the fingers which an accelerometer should be able to handle fairly easily.

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    2. John Robson Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Gravity

      Still works at that altitude - the issue is that they are in freefall.

      But actually someone else has pointed out that it's not "up" that is needed, but acceleration of the fingers. If you are just doing acceleration based measurements then you need to be pretty sophisticated, I'd go for some sort of visual tracking hybrid else the haptics will trigger the motion detectors, triggering the haptics....

      PS - Yes I know you specified orbit, indicating more understanding than most of the population

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  4. Graham Marsden
    Alien

    So...

    ... we've had the US air force buying PS3s, will we now have NASA buying WIIs?

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  5. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    How about waldo gloves?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_%28short_story%29

    If hands and arms are wrapped in haptic machinery, they don't need actually to be in space suit arms and gloves.

    Then again, maybe they don't need to be in space at all. We could put remote-control android bodies in space and have them operated from the ground.

    Oops! I just killed the manned space programme.

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  6. Dr Patrick J R Harkin
    Coat

    "air-writing accelerometer "

    Won't work in space. No air.

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